"If you liked Mass Effect 3, you should probably get the Citadel DLC. BioWare put a lot of effort into it, producing the most polished and varied DLC experience yet. It offers a lot, and receives a ton of fan-love in return, including our team’s. The general consensus – for the first time in ME3 DLC history (granted, we’re not talking about a century here) – is that this is a no-brainer, a 10 for 10, a perfect example of what BioWare can do when focusing on the characters we all fell in love with a while back. I have yet to see a single truly skeptical tweet about it in my twitter feed (which wasn’t as kind to either Leviathan or Omega)…

Well, aside from my own tweets, that is.

I have no doubts that some of you will find this review a bit prickly. “He just cannot be satisfied,” you’ll whisper out loud, surprised by my shifting eyebrows. “If he didn’t enjoy this, he’s just a dick, an old fart.” And, hey, I just might be. But I’m also a pretty honest guy, focused on my own range of topics and nitpicking interests, offering nothing more but my own opinions.

I also seem to be one of the few people that felt truly alienated by what was happening in Citadel. Despite all the best intentions from both myself and the content’s producers (I have absolutely no doubt about the fact they pulled out all the stops and I salute them for the DLC’s success), it didn’t click for me. It didn’t work as well as it did for most. It felt horribly off."

Yep. Dream logic, fanfiction levels of writing, lorerape left right and center.

Not good enough, Bioware. This is your swansong, your final DLC? And people swallow this shit and enjoy it? My faith in humanity lessens.

Also, the review is exactly how I feel. Its an Easter Egg, a little joke, taken way too far. Its seemingly designed purely to mess around with the fans. Which would be fine in a spinoff, but this isn't a spinoff!

Last edited by Andromidius on Thu Mar 07, 2013 8:39 am; edited 1 time in total

jojon2se wrote:Citadel can pretty much be summed up with the expression: "empty carbohydrates".

One can only hope this is deviously intentional and soon to be followed up with a sobering reality check.

That's my only hope left :)

"And oh yeah, a big ass Reaper invasion.""You can be damn sure that nobody on Earth or Palaven are watching vids or playing quazar.""But up here nobody has to get their hands dirty.""These people have no idea.""Sometimes I feel this whole Citadel was a mistake."

(And then sees the Citadel get attacked by Cerberus.)(And then gets an apartment and promptly ignores the security of the Citadel and the galaxy.)

I can't be certain about this, but it seems these DLCs are made based on what people on the forums want (vocal minority?). The forums only make up a small portion of the playerbase as far as I'm concerned.

Some fans claim that Bioware isn't listening to them or that they don't care, but it's kind of hard to please all 4.5 million people who bought this game. It's like trying to pick out issues in a crowd of 4.5 million. Kind of hard to hear everyone. Even the people on the forums, which is quite a bit.

Not to mention they have to pick an certain issue and spend a couple months making a DLC with it.

Magnetite, the problem with that is that these things are made several months in advance, and planned for even longer than that.

So while little details and certain directions may be clearly influenced by fan feedback, I don't think its true that Leviathan was made purely because of fan feedback from ME3 specifically.

Or that Omega wouldn't have happened if fans, after playing ME3, didn't say "Oh we all know an Omega DLC is coming, right?"

Feedback is a gradual process, over years. The DLC process for From Ashes comes purely from ME2 DLC at latest.The DLC process for Leviathan comes from ME2 DLC at latest.The DLC process for Omega comes from ME3 at latest.The DLC process for Citadel, however, is probably the first DLC to significantly be guided by fan feedback throughout ME3's post-launch and reception of the first DLCs (Ashes, EC, maybe Leviathan).

So to call all the DLCs flat out 'fanservice' isn't really ...it. Bioware still has a direction and plot THEY want to lay out (and WILL lay out), but it can be adjusted by what they hear, sure.

Citadel, however, is all the fanservice they can muster into one DLC.

Now I hope Bioware is making a point with that, and they show a few little reveals about what Citadel DLC even means to the larger picture ;)

(Because I actually think it does matter. - see other threads here for why)

I have to agree that the entirety of the Citadel DLC felt like post-ending content.

What if they release post-ending DLC and eventually end up making it so that you can only play this DLC after the ending? That would be perfect.

Hell, maybe this is what all the 'time travel' tweets were all about...

_________________"A good leader is someone who values the life of his men over the success of the mission, but understands that sometimes the cost of failing a mission is higher than the cost of losing those men." - Anderson

DoomsdayDevice wrote:I have to agree that the entirety of the Citadel DLC felt like post-ending content.

What if they release post-ending DLC and eventually end up making it so that you can only play this DLC after the ending? That would be perfect.

Hell, maybe this is what all the 'time travel' tweets were all about...

That's exactly what I think.

Playing Citadel in this current form is supposed to remind players just who they're fighting for. It's been a year, and people forget.

But I'm also more sure that it'll return as post-ending, maybe with more direct references to the ending (London + ?) and how the war is exactly going (majority of DLC, at least social part, will stay the same).

SwobyJ wrote:Or that Omega wouldn't have happened if fans, after playing ME3, didn't say "Oh we all know an Omega DLC is coming, right?"

There was maybe a paragraph worth of stuff in the original script regarding Omega. More like a rough outline. Since the game was finished in October (started testing that month), and the script leak was in November, that kind of jives with their "make DLC after main game is finished". I know a lot of people seem to think that Omega was cut from the game to sell later, but if that was the case, these other DLCs would have been in that script too. They weren't.

Other than that, people actually wanted to retake Omega with Aria. Least from what I read on the forums.

SwobyJ wrote:Or that Omega wouldn't have happened if fans, after playing ME3, didn't say "Oh we all know an Omega DLC is coming, right?"

There was maybe a paragraph worth of stuff in the original script regarding Omega. More like a rough outline. Since the game was finished in October (started testing that month), and the script leak was in November, that kind of jives with their "make DLC after main game is finished". I know a lot of people seem to think that Omega was cut from the game to sell later, but if that was the case, these other DLCs would have been in that script too. They weren't.

Other than that, people actually wanted to retake Omega with Aria. Least from what I read on the forums.

Not true. The leak of the script could have been a very, very early draft. How you described it is not how the process typically works.

By 'cut', I mean 'originally intended in the main game', not 'it was largely ready to go but they decided not to include it'.

That the big-boss reveal at the archives might be one of my least favorite Mass Effect moments ever, as it uses two of my least favorite tropes of all time – the “evil clone”, which leaves behind a rather unpleasant aftertaste ..., and the soap-operaish “sleeping beauty” trope, which is used here to explain why the clone remained docile for all this time after Project Lazarus (he was in a coma!).

Nope. Don't care anymore.

If I have to keep internally shouting "you missed the point" when someone says this about the "evil" clone, I'll shoot blood from eyes. NOOOOPE. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPE.

That the big-boss reveal at the archives might be one of my least favorite Mass Effect moments ever, as it uses two of my least favorite tropes of all time – the “evil clone”, which leaves behind a rather unpleasant aftertaste ..., and the soap-operaish “sleeping beauty” trope, which is used here to explain why the clone remained docile for all this time after Project Lazarus (he was in a coma!).

Nope. Don't care anymore.

If I have to keep internally shouting "you missed the point" when someone says this about the "evil" clone, I'll shoot blood from eyes. NOOOOPE. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPE.

It's entirely possible to "get it" and still think it's stupid. There are many good parts of this DLC, and this part was not one of them.

_________________Assume everything has value until proven wrong. Sometimes that doesn't take very long.

That the big-boss reveal at the archives might be one of my least favorite Mass Effect moments ever, as it uses two of my least favorite tropes of all time – the “evil clone”, which leaves behind a rather unpleasant aftertaste ..., and the soap-operaish “sleeping beauty” trope, which is used here to explain why the clone remained docile for all this time after Project Lazarus (he was in a coma!).

Nope. Don't care anymore.

If I have to keep internally shouting "you missed the point" when someone says this about the "evil" clone, I'll shoot blood from eyes. NOOOOPE. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPE.

It's entirely possible to "get it" and still think it's stupid. There are many good parts of this DLC, and this part was not one of them.